Insight
Without any past communications for four years, the Mustang in all its glory wanted to launch in a creative way, increasing awareness to its highly specific target audience who have a hard time focusing on something for more than 5 seconds.
So how were MEC going to get these people to engage? By creating mystery, action, thrill, stunts and more. With a limited budget of $400,000, it needed to speak their language. Ford’s audience are males, young & educated, love to live life on the edge & aren't afraid of challenges and trying new things.
The agency’s challenge was to rise from the ashes with a new look and feel to the car and have the audience love it. The agency needed to think of something daring, and fast.
Strategy
Pushing the limits and making the impossible possible is an attribute that sets in the minds of the audience. They are difficult to please, having an “I’ve seen it all” attitude. They are barely impressed with the day-to-day activities and are constantly driven by new challenges. If Ford wanted to impress them, it had to create a stunt that was so cool, it would never leave the audience’s mind.
The agency used an iconic location in the shape of a stunt that was going to be broad-casted live across the GCC. Since it wanted to maximise reach, awareness & engagement, MEC decided to run 3 phases: a teaser phase, the “take-off”, and the aftermath.
Ford ran a teaser video campaign that increased their intrigue as well as their excitement towards what might happen on November 19. It revealed the 2015 Ford Mustang on top of the Burj Khalifa on that day with thousands of bystanders watching the entire stunt on a huge screen that was easily visible in Dubai Mall.
The agency also managed to live-stream the entire stunt for all GCC to witness on YouTube and supported it with mobile, social and videos. These platforms were dependent on the data and audience insight and were used as the key supports to send the messages across.
Execution
Ford unveiled the 2015 yellow Mustang convertible on an iconic location through an action-like heroic stunt. Where is the iconic location you ask? A better question would be how tall is the Burj Khalifa really? Because that’s where it was placed. MEC made sure that the key markets could experience the whole thing by live-streaming it on YouTube. The set up was out of this world.
The car was dismantled and reassembled overnight on the Burj’s 127th floor. That’s not the great part; it used different stuntmen to execute a whole scenario where Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Industries gets a phone call to deliver a package from Detroit to Dubai. While rock-climbing, he hovered down onto a horse that took him to his Mustang driving it to the airport where he gets into a helicopter and flies all the way to Dubai’s Downtown district. At that moment, the cameras go live on the big outdoor screen and a helicopter is actually seen where Bill Ford climbs down onto Dubai Mall’s rooftop. He sways down on a rope and runs across the crowds of people who are in amazement. He jumps over the rails of the fountains onto a jet ski and rides across the waves of the water taking him to the other side where the Burj Khalifa is.
This whole stunt caused a lot of commotion amongst the bystanders as well as the online audience. Their excitement helped release a 2-minute video two days later on YouTube getting within a span of 3 days around 1.3 million views. An exceptional experience.
Results
Ford became the first brand to launch on top of the World’s Tallest Building, The Burj Khalifa, gaining over 4 million video views on all 4 main videos that were illustrated and 1.3 million views on the final after-movie that was released a few days after the launch.
It also acquired over 930,000 overall campaign clicks, 59.5 million impressions, 8.7 million reach on social media and 2,500 new YouTube subscribers. The YouTube masthead alone received over the benchmark number of impressions (which is 27 million at most).